Costa Rica

Saturday, May 3, 2014

Earth Day 2014

Look at that spectacular globe!

May
already? It feels like it was just
February. It doesn’t hurt that the
weather still acts like it’s February.
I’m still wearing a hoodie and jeans outside.

But today I
thought I’d update about our Earth Day 2014.
Earth Day would be a perfect time for people to realize just how
beneficial going vegan would be to the planet.
Raising farm animals for humans to eat is one of the biggest causes of
climate change, which endangers everyone and everything on this planet. Going vegan would be more helpful to the
planet than driving a little less or replacing your light bulbs or recycling
your paper bags (all of which are GOOD things to do but it’s vastly more
beneficial to just go vegan). It’s been
said that going vegan is like taking a million cars off of the roads for an
entire year. Now imagine if we could
get the percentage of vegans in the U.S. up above 1% that it currently is
at. That would be a huge! You really can’t say you care about the
environment or the planet, in general, if you don’t go vegan. It’s easy!
If you’d like to learn more about the history of Earth Day, click HERE.

For various holidays throughout the
year, my wife tries to make meals that have a cultural tie to that event or
foods that have a theme. On Earth Day,
my wife and I typically eat special ‘Earth Day’-themed meals (dishes generally
served with lots of color), take in one of those DisneyNature films (they
donate part of the ticket sales the first week they’re out to various
charities.), and whatever else we have time for. This year was no different.

For dinner, my wife made a few
dishes that had various colors in them.
First, she started out with a strawberry-mango guacamole from The Oh
She Glows Cookbook by Angela Liddon.
When she first mentioned the guacamole I pictured a typical guacamole
just with red and yellow streaks in it.
However, to my surprise, the guacamole was actually strawberries,
mangos, and avocados diced up in a bowl.
Not that it mattered because it was still amazing! The recipe made a lot of guacamole and I
probably could’ve just had that for dinner and been satisfied. I would definitely check out that recipe if
I were you because while those 3 things may not sound like they go together,
they do. There was a really good balance
of flavors going on.

Next up, my wife made Brian
Patton’s meatball Parmesan burgers that she had seen in an issue of VegNews
Magazine. They were more like
sliders but even so, I could only eat about 3 of them since I had already
pigged out on our other dishes. She
also made homemade Rustica buns from Joni Marie Newman’s book, The Best
Veggie Burgers On The Planet (so far, that’s accurate). The buns had sun-dried tomatoes in them and
the burgers had marinara sauce, pesto, and vegan mozzarella cheese. So, as you can probably tell, there were a
lot of colors even in the burgers. I’m
not a huge pesto fan so 3 burgers probably would’ve been perfect even if I
didn’t have other dishes to eat.

The pic doesn't do the burgers justice!

Lastly, my wife made another one of
Brian Patton’s recipes – green bean fries.
They ended up basically being green bean tempura but they were really
good, nonetheless. Hell, tempura in
general is just really good. This
recipe was from The Sexy Vegan’s Happy Hour At Home cookbook. How sexy I felt after eating way too many
green bean tempura fries is debatable.
The fries were accompanied with a tahini dipping sauce, which went well
together. I suppose if colors weren’t
important you could just use soy sauce as a dipping sauce instead of the tahini
but you’d be missing out if you did.

We rounded out the day with the
DisneyNature film, Bears. We’ve
seen every one of their films that have come out on Earth Days in years
past. They’re all pretty entertaining
and they’re a good way to expose people to the fact that humans aren’t the only
creatures on Earth that form relations and have feelings. I’m not ashamed to admit that it’s not hard
to form an emotional bond to the animals they follow in each film. Plus, like I mentioned, they donate part of
their ticket sales in the first week to various charities that tend to deal
with the environment or animals. If
it’s still out, I suggest checking out the movie. John C. Reilly also narrates the movie.

So, that was 2014. It was relatively low-key but the food was
quite delicious! I hope everyone had a
good Earth Day. Did anyone do anything
special this year? Let me know!

Until next time, keep calm and
vegan on!

You can find Joni Marie Newman in a
number of places online but you can follow her on Twitter at: @jonimarienewman

You can also find Brian L. Patton
in a number of places online but you can follow him on Twitter at:
@TheSexyVegan

You can also find Angela Liddon in a number of places
online but you can follow her on Twitter at: @ohsheglows

P.S. - The photo of the Earth was found using Google Image search and can been seen HERE.